Publication

Singularity-invariant leg substitutions in pentapods

Conference Article

Conference

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Edition

2010

Pages

2766-2771

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2010.5652202

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

A pentapod is usually defined as a 5-degree-of-freedom fully-parallel manipulator with an axial spindle as moving platform. This kind of manipulators have revealed as an interesting alternative to serial robots handling axisymmetric tools. Their particular geometry permits that, in one tool axis, inclination angles of up to 90 degrees are possible thus overcoming the orientation limits of the classical Stewart platform. This talk presents a solution to the problem of finding those changes in the location of the leg attachments of a pentapod that leave its singularity locus invariant. Although the solution to this problem does not provide a fully characterization of the singularities, it provides a lot of insight into its nature. It is shown, for example, that there are four different architectures for a pentapod with a completely different behavior from the point of view of their singularities. The kinematics of pentaponds with coplanar attachments at the fixed base has previously been studied as rigid subassemblies of a Stewart platforms. In this talk, we treat the general case in which the base attachments are arbitrarily located in 3D space.

Categories

manipulators, robot kinematics.

Author keywords

pentapod, fully-parallel robots, singularities, singularity-invariant transformations

Scientific reference

J. Borràs and F. Thomas. Singularity-invariant leg substitutions in pentapods, 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2010, Taipei, Taiwan, pp. 2766-2771, IEEE.